Meet
Dr. Tony Hudson
President & Founder, Racially Conscious Collaboration™
Dr. Tony Hudson is a nationally respected coach, speaker, trainer, and leadership and organizational change consultant whose work is rooted in a lifelong calling to racial equity.
That calling began in childhood and came into sharp focus through experiences that shaped both his voice and his vision. As a seventh grader, Tony was racially profiled while waiting for the bus—on the very same corner where George Floyd would later lose his life and spark a global movement for racial justice.
This same year he won the Martin Luther King Jr. Essay Contest, a moment that affirmed his clarity and commitment beyond his years.
His commitment to racial justice deepened in college when he gave up a football scholarship as part of his successful challenge to his university’s use of Indigenous culture as a team mascot.
Years later, Tony led a large public school system to adopt its first systemic racial equity transformation plan. He also returned to his first professional love—Freedom Schools—opening several of these impactful summer programs after becoming the first Black principal of a school and leading it to the top percentile in Minnesota for the rate at which it was reducing racial disparities.
Tony proved what he always believed: that organizational cultures can transform when racial equity is placed at the center. His passion expanded to include work across corporate, nonprofit, and public sectors—centering racial equity in organizational change everywhere. That purpose led him to found Racially Conscious Collaboration™, where he now supports individuals and organizations across the U.S. and internationally in sectors ranging from higher education and healthcare to philanthropy, marketing, and beyond.
Tony’s greater mission is to organize more people, resources, and institutions to grow their racial consciousness and achieve intersectional equity. He partners with universities, healthcare systems, associations, foundations, marketing firms, and others to help teams build culture change that is strategic, measurable, and humanizing.
Today, Tony coaches organizational leaders and everyday people personally, facilitates transformative trainings, and equips organizations using the Racially Conscious Collaboration Tool™ for healthy cross-racial dialogue and action. Through his three-phase process, the I³ Pathway of Transformation, he helps individuals and teams reflect, converse, and collaborate through an evolved racial equity lens. Then, he helps them reimagine their leadership and culture and set actionable goals for sustained impact. As both coach and consultant, Dr. Hudson walks alongside clients until they experience real and lasting success.
Through his Six Hallmarks of Effective Anti-Racist Leadership & Organizations™, Tony provides clients with the tools and insights to build sustainable equity practices rooted in shared responsibility and results. Whether he’s posting daily wisdom through Deeply Rooted social media posts, delivering a keynote, or guiding leadership teams through hard conversations, Dr. Hudson is driven by one goal: to organize people, systems, and resources toward a more racially conscious, intersectional, and fully human world.
As Tony often says, the stories of his clients are his greatest credibility. You can hear directly from them at RaciallyConsciousCollaboration.com—leaders, professionals, and everyday people who’ve learned, with his guidance, that we can address race and racial disparities in a healthy, practical, and sustainable way—because that’s what we do every day. Tony is married to the greatest racial equity coach, wife, and mother on the planet. He’s still trying to convince his kids that he is, in fact, part of the first generation where hip-hop became the #1 genre, that Nas is the greatest rapper of all time, and that Devil in a Blue Dress and Sinners are top cinematic masterpieces ever.
Mostly, he wants you to know—just as the one core value of his company, love, reminds us—he loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Since racism won’t stop, then we won’t stop.™
Before his work as a consultant, he led systemic racial equity transformation work for the Osseo School District of Minnesota as the Director of Equity. Before that, he was a Head Principal and led his school to the 99th percentile in Minnesota for the rate at which they were eliminating racial disparities. Before that, he volunteered with Isaiah Minnesota where he led school superintendents statewide to address the cradle to prison pipeline that results from racial disparities in school discipline. Before that, he served in a series of community-based, non-profit leadership positions, including the Minnesota Children’s Defense Fund where he founded several Freedom Schools. Before that, he made “Devil in a Blue Dress” his all-time favorite movie and spent a short infinity deciding whether he should pattern his work off of Easy or Mouse. Still deciding.
Now, if he could just convince his two teenage sons that he is INDEED part of the first generation of hip-hop and a reason why it became the world’s greatest genre of music… that would be supreme recognition.